..saw the $1.6 million donation as a defensive move that saved him many millions of dollars.

“I was a bit concerned that if the Coalition got in a lot of my investments in environmental causes would have been down the plughole.”

Admittedly Wood’s environmental investments do not from this article seem highly oriented towards returning a profit. But what is a ‘vested’ interest and what a ‘public’ interest position is often not self-evident; those who face financial ruin from environmentalist causes would presumably see themselves as representing a public interest, and Wood’s desire to protect his investment in those causes as a vested interest.

For the past couple of days, The Age has been going hard on the failure of a Liberal Party ‘associated entity’, Business First, to file its required disclosure forms. It was the lead story yesterday, and still on page one this morning.

The purpose of these laws is to reveal the identities of financial supporters of political parties. While Business First is undoubtedly in technical breach of the law, what The Age isn’t telling you is that it had no donors large enough to require disclosure. If they had followed the law, Business First’s AEC form would, like the vast majority of forms submitted to the AEC, have received no attention at all because it contains nothing of any interest.

The Commonwealth Electoral Act is probably the most disobeyed piece of legislation on the Commonwealth statute books. While this is mostly people avoiding their legal obligation to turn up to the polling booths, there is also widespread non-compliance with the paperwork required to be a political entity or a donor above the threshold. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier in the month I looked at median weekly income for arts graduates, all graduates, and people with certificate III/IV qualifications, as reported in the 2006 census (note the various data caveats in the first post). I found that arts graduates had similar income profiles to certificate III/IV holders.

The figure below looks at males with income around the 75th percentile for their qualification in 2006, and tells a different story. In their 20s, earnings are fairly similar between the three groups (in the rather crude way I have had to do this, the ‘all graduates’ aged 25-29 just missed out on the next income bracket, and if the test had been ‘all non-arts graduates’ may have made it).

By their 30s, arts graduates in this part of the income distribution are clearly pulling away from the certificate III/IV people. But they are not gaining on all graduates. Indeed, the gap is likely to be larger than shown at the median, because graduates at the 75th percentile are ticking the highest census income category of $2,000 a week or more. We can’t tell from this data source how much they are earning, other than that it must be over $500 a week more than an arts graduate in the same relative position.

Last week I gave a presentation to an electoral law workshop on the campaign finance law applying to ‘third parties’. My basic thesis was that the rules introduced in NSW and Queensland (discussed in my recent paper and this submission) are heavily biased against third parties, and in favour of political parties and the government of the day. In NSW and Queensland, third parties have much lower donations and expenditure caps than political parties. If the ALP submission to the current parliamentary review of campaign finance is a guide, the government will push for a similar regime federally.

In the Australian Election Study 2010 there is a question about the politics of the respondent’s parents. Though the generations don’t share politics as much as spouses, politics is not looking like a major source of division in family get-togethers. Labor politics seems particularly hereditary. About three-quarters of Labor identifiers in 2010 say that their parents were also Labor supporters. 30% of respondents did not know which party their parents supported.

CIS and U of M are both great places to work, but I’ve long wanted to do more research and writing on higher education than I could with my current jobs. I’ve always had many more ideas for papers than I have had time in the week. Grattan offered me the opportunity to write those papers, and without having to leave Carlton. My new office is about a block away from my Melbourne University office, and a few blocks from where I live.

Last week I spoke at a seminar on the public funding of the humanities and social sciences. In my presentation I showed a slide of the earnings of male arts bachelor degree graduates compared to all graduates, showing that the median male arts graduate earned significantly less than other bachelor graduates (less than the slide suggests, since I did not extract arts graduates from the total).

What I should also have done is added median earnings for the upper vocational qualifications, which I have now done in the figure below (due to limitations in the way the ABS publishes census data, I have taken median as the mid-point in the income catgory in which the median person appears). Overall it shows a quite similar earnings profile with the arts graduates, with the effects of earlier full-time workforce entry showing in the higher earnings for certificate III/IV qualified workers in their 20s.

So why don’t public universities directly offer courses to these students? There would seem to be several reasons:

1) If they took the students directly, they would have to report that they sometimes take school leavers with weak Year 12 results. Whether or not the students improve a lot in their year at the feeder college, the back door entry method allows the course to have higher apparent admission standards.

2) They aren’t equipped to do remedial work – better to clearly identify the problematic students, and have another organisation teach them in different ways.

3) They are equipped to do remedial work, but can’t do it on Commonwealth-supported rates – hence putting them in the full-fee sector. Read the rest of this entry »